1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a form display method, a form display apparatus, a program for implementing the method, and a storage medium storing the program. In particular, the present invention relates to a form display method and a form display apparatus that carry out form recognition and character recognition on electronic images obtained by reading various documents such as forms and application forms, as well as a program for implementing the method and a storage medium storing the program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, various documents such as forms and application forms are sent as sheet media to e.g. an office work management center of a company, converted into electronic images through the manual intervention, and stored in a database of a server in the company.
In recent years, systems have been increasingly used in which facsimile image data of various documents and electronic image data read by a scanner are received and form recognition and character recognition are carried out on the received data, thereby automatically performing jobs. For example, there has been a form reading method which recognizes printed or handwritten characters on forms such as transfer slips for use in exchange business in financial institutions. In this form reading method, characters on a form captured as an image are read to determine the type of the form. There has been proposed a technique for, in the case where the type of a form has not been successfully determined, determining the type of the form based upon a manually-input form type and carrying out reading of characters on the form based upon the determined form type. With this technique, even in the case where a form to be scanned is defective, characters on it can be correctly recognized.
With the above conventional technique, form recognition and character recognition can be automatically carried out on received electronic images using business software, but recognition accuracy is not satisfactory, and hence recognition results have to be manually corrected in some cases. If there is any electronic image that cannot be recognized as a form, the following problems may arise.
1. In the case where a plurality of continuous unrecognizable forms are displayed as one job in list form, when an operator who checks the job finds that the job actually consists of a plurality of types of forms, he/she has to carry out complicated operations so as to divide the job into single forms.
2. Conversely, in the case where a plurality of continuous unrecognizable forms are displayed on page basis as a plurality of jobs in list form, when an operator who checks the jobs finds that these jobs actually consist of one form that extends over a plurality of sheets, he/she has to carry out complicated operations so as to combine the jobs into one form.
3. In the case where handwritten introductory notes are added as attachment data to forms, such attachment data cannot be registered in advance as part of the forms since they are formed in a wide variety of formats. For this reason, when form recognition is carried out on such forms, they are regarded as unrecognizable forms. As a result, it is necessary to carry out complicated operations so as to combine a previous job and attachment data into one form.
4. In the above cases 1 to 3, if a server receives a plurality of electronic image data from a plurality of client computers, data received from different client computers may be meaninglessly combined with one another unless they are combined in reception units.